Lazy Guide to Net Culture: Stranger ways here we come…

Published on Monday 10 July 2006 17:11

If you want to appear like you’re at the cutting edge of net culture but can’t be bothered to spend hours online, then never fear. Scotsman.com’s pathetic team of geeks, freaks and gimps will do the hard work for you. While you sip wine, read a book or engage in normal social interaction, they will burn out their retinas staring at badly designed web pages and dodge creeps in chatrooms to prepare for you: Scotsman.com’s lazy guide to net culture.

This is why we have the internet.

Forget "the semantic web". Forget "2.0". Forget "community." It's all irrelevant. The entire project has been building to this one moment: a unique event that shows us the true purpose of this wonderful interconnected archive.

Here it is: a clip of The Smiths appearing on children's telly (TV-AM's S.P.L.A.T.!) in April 1984. On Charlie's Bus. Going to on a trip with a bunch of kids. To the tune of Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now. To meet Sandie Shaw. Who then sings what is arguably The Smiths' most depressing song, Jeane. To said bunch of children:

Let's review the highlights of that. (If you can't view it in this page, the original is on YouTube.)

Child: Where are we going?

Morrissey: We're all going mad.

Child: I thought we were going to Kew Gardens.

And for those of you who can't quite recall the lyrics to Jeane here's a taste:

There's ice on the sink where we bathe

So how can you call this a home

When you know it's a grave?

Yet you still have that greedy grace

As you tidy the place

But it will never be clean

Personally, it being children's telly and all, I'd have gone for The Wheels On The Bus Go Round And Round but then again I didn't pen Girlfriend In A Coma.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that I had found the apotheosis of web strangeness in the form of Goat On A Pole. How wrong I was. How arrogant. Now I see that I was blind. Truly, there are more things in heaven and online than are dreamt of in my philosophy.

I know you must be thinking this is a spoof. And I did too but there are bootleg albums for sale featuring Shaw's cover version from S.P.L.A.T.! so it looks like this is legit. If that is the case then the twisted genius who was responsible for booking Morrissey and Marr on children's TV should be ennobled and given a generous pension as they are clearly a national treasure.

The Lazy Guide may or may not appear next week, depending on whether I have managed to stopping snorting with uncontrollable laughter. Maybe repeated listenings to Meat Is Murder and Strangeways Here We Come will help.